Monday, January 25, 2010

I don't remember the details or the source, but I think Rebecca Cantrell once told an interviewer that becoming a mother had influenced her writing.

I admit a slight temptation to roll my eyes at this, a temptation, that disappeared, however, soon after I started reading Cantrell's novel A Trace of Smoke. Cantrell sets the book in the least relaxing of cities — Berlin — in the least relaxing of times — 1931. The Nazi party is on the rise, and people disappear daily, their photos to turn up in the city's Hall of the Unnamed Dead.

Hannah Vogel finds a photo of her brother there and, for a reason particular to the time, must conceal this fact as she searches for information about him. And then 5-year-old Anton turns up, claiming Hannah is his mother. Thus a second mystery for Hannah: Who are the child's real parents?

More later, but for now:

What other crime stories feature mothers, would-be mothers or motherless children? And, in a genre where victims disappear permanently by being killed, is it a surprise that more authors don't write about children and others the victims leave behind them?

Seriously though. I will admit to seeing things different now that I'm a parent. Perhaps having a different set of filters in place. I could imagine it affecting ones writing, just as any other thing could affect ones writing.

Brian, you ought to read Rebecca’s essay. I made this post thinking that motherhood could affect the story. She has fascinating things to say about the process of writing. Some of what she says would apply to tasks other than writing as well, I think.

That's an excellent choice considering the child's role in Salvo's life and Livia's. I don't know if Andrea Camilleri has children, but he thinks more deeply about parenthood in this book than most authors do, male or female.

My choice for this theme is Kate Atkinson's When Will There Be Good News? but I can't say more about it without giving away the punch line. It was my favourite book of the year for 2008. Brilliant writing in any genre.

In The Father Hunt a young woman (last name DeNovo, a nice bit of wordplay) hires Wolfe & Archie to find her father, who abandoned her mother. She gets access to the two by virtue of working for Lily Rowan.

In The Mother Hunt young widow finds a baby abandoned on her doorstep with a note pinned to the blanket saying "a baby should live where its father did." So she wants to know if her dead husband did in fact father the child. This one is the book in which we learn that Archie is not exclusively Lily's man.

Mothers, from the saintly to the psychopathic, are frequently major characters in Ross Macdonald’s crime fiction. I recently read “The Wycherley Woman” (1961) in which the title character is a disturbed and imbalanced woman yet whose personal history makes her a somewhat sympathetic character. Many of the Lew Archer novels feature dysfunctional families.

Ian Rankin’s Inspector Rebus series often feature mothers as main characters. A little-seen but influential matriarch of a politically and artistically influential family appears in “Set in Darkness” (2000). In “Dead Souls” (1999) Rebus investigates the disappearance of an old girlfriend’s teenage son. In this novel and in “A Question of Blood” Rankin explores not only the deep emotional impact the loss of a child can have on his/her family but how this loss can dictate family members’ futures in unpredictable ways. Ruth Rendell also excavates this territory in her crime fiction.

“…is it a surprise that more authors don't write about children and others the victims leave behind them?” Perhaps when they do, their publishers market these novels as serious “literature” (such as Alice Sebold’s “The Lovely Bones”) and remove that “crime fiction” genre label. Also, many authors end their tale within a short time of the murder being resolved and so do not choose to explore the aftermath of a child’s death.

Richard Hughes’s “A High Wind in Jamaica” (1929) is often cited as being one of the most insightful novels about children and childhood ever written but Hughes himself had no children.

Elisabeth, I read one short story of MacDonald's in which a mother takes decisive action on her daughter's behalf in a way that makes her a sympathetic, though criminal, character.

Your mention of MacDonald reminds me that family intrigue was an undertone of much hard-boiled fiction in the '20s through the '50s and maybe in the early '60s. Think of the tyrannical aunt (was she an aunt?) in "The Thin Man," for instance.

I'd forgotten, too, that the one Ruth Rendell novel I've read involves a mother and a son, though not quite the way I was getting at in this post. I didn't know about Rankin's visiting and revisiting such themes.

“…is it a surprise that more authors don't write about children and others the victims leave behind them?”

Perhaps when they do, their publishers market these novels as serious “literature” (such as Alice Sebold’s “The Lovely Bones”) and remove that “crime fiction” genre label. Also, many authors end their tale within a short time of the murder being resolved and so do not choose to explore the aftermath of a child’s death.

Oh, and I asked if the two stories had been published together because current editions of the Nero Wolfe books often include two or more usually three novellas. I thought Rex Stout might have conceived or published these two ogether.

If she changed her book title to "A Trace of Vog" she'd describe what the volcano on that island she lives on is sending our way. They even got traces of the stuff out on Kauai today. That's the furthest west of the Neighbor Islands, several hundred miles away from the Big Island of Hawaii.

Far better to leave kids out than to use them as mere props, plus I don't know how many writers are asking dramatic questions that kids or widows/widowers can help with (here I'm assuming all mystery novels ask a dramatic question that, when answered, ends the story).

A Trace of Smoke treats all the victims of Hitler's rise to power with equal respect and dignity, as she does the victims of the killer in her story.

Kids can be hard to manage as characters, it's difficult to make them dramatically active, though A Trace shows how to do it beautifully...

Thanks. The child in Trace of Smoke is a wonderfully effective dramatic device. You may glean from these comments that I at first thought that this is what Rebecca Cantrell meant when she wrote that being a mother had infuenced her writing. She meant something else, as it turned out, but I still suspect that having a child figure in the story in the way this one does is likelier from a female author than a male one. I realize I am treading on dangerous territory in making such an assumption, though.

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This blog is a proud winner of the 2009 Spinetingler Award for special services to the industry and its blogkeeper a proud former guest on Wisconsin Public Radio's Here on Earth. In civilian life I'm a copy editor in Philadelphia. When not reading crime fiction, I like to read history. When doing neither, I like to travel. When doing none of the above, I like listening to music or playing it, the latter rarely and badly.
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